Aug 6th, 2007 | Apple, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs | No Comments
It seems that the already small group of blogging CEOs has just lost a prominent member. Except that the blog of Apple’s legendary founder Steve Jobs was a hoax to begin with. If you’re a rock star tech executive, perhaps it’s a wise decision to start a blog before someone else does it for you…
Edit: Forbes is really milking this for all it’s worth. And it has a certain post-modern quality to it: you can watch an interview with Dan Lyons about the news he has himself created (of course on the Forbes website). When citizen journalists do the reporting, the real journalists just make their own news.
Jul 19th, 2007 | Blogging Legal Issues, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, John Mackey, Whole Foods Inc | 3 Comments
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey must have been thinking something along those lines when he invented an on-line alter ego that praised him and his company and bashed rival Wild Oats. BusinessWeek, CNNMoney and the PRSA have read-worthy commentary and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas shares an entertaining tidbit related to the fiasco.
Mackey’s actions are now the subject of an SEC investigation and after it was announced that the Whole Foods Board is also looking at it, he today reacted by publishing an apology - interestingly enough not through his blog (which is “temporarily closed”) but through the PR section of the company site (link).
The way the apology is worded demonstrates that there is pressure mounting. Some are calling for Mackey’s head and there is a considerable amount of confusion as to why he chose to anonymously bad-mouth the competition on a Yahoo! finance forum in the first place.
I’m still looking both at the entries in Mackey’s blog and at the Yahoo! board - it seems like a fascinating case, certainly worth a little linguistic investigation. Here is a list of all postings Mackey wrote under his pseudonym, if you care to do a little detective work. What’s strange is that the responses to his final post in August 2006 suggest that the other board users were quite aware of his identity (one participant responds with “Goodbye JM!” to his farewell message). Has this incident taken almost a year to show up on the media’s radar? It seems so, which makes me wonder who or what made it show up right now…
A close reading of some of the Yahoo! postings provides an interesting insight into the psyche of an executive who is truly “mission-driven” (see below) and has apparent trouble dealing with criticism.
Here’s a sample:
unibomber999, radmok is interested in neither facts nor logic. He or she, like so many other shorts on this Board, love to spin their fantasies about the future while completely ignoring the facts of both the past and the present. radmok (hubris, liberfar and many other shorts & bashers) choose to focus on Whole Foods competition improving, while completely ignoring the reality that Whole Foods is improving & evolving far faster. They don’t seem to realize that Whole Foods isn’t sitting still, but learning and growing as an organization at a very rapid rate. They wrongly believe that Whole Foods competitive advantage is all about organic foods and that once Whole Foods competitors are all selling it (which has already been the case for nearly a decade now) Whole Foods will fade into the sunset. They refuse to recognize that Whole Foods is a mission driven retailer that has evolved numerous competitive advantages including a superior business model of optimizing stakeholder relationships, a unique company culture based on empowerment, service and innovation that cannot be duplicated by a command and control supermarket company, a happy and motivated work force, and highly motivated, skilled, and knowledgable leadership throughout the company. The shorts and bashers keep waiting for the whole thing to collapse, not understanding that Whole Foods has been continuously growing and evolving for 26 years now. This ain’t no overnight success story. One thing I’ve enjoyed about this Board is watching the shorts come and go every year. They come on to this Board making highly arrogant and “original” proclamations that this is just a stupid grocery store which is ridiculously overvalued and is going to get its comeuppance very, very soon. How many shorts have the long-term participants on this Board watched disappear every year with large losses on their shorts? Several hundreds now. Surely we must be getting close to a thousand or so by now. This current batch of shorts (with one or two exceptions) won’t be here a year from now. They will have disappeared. However, new shorts will take their place (for the shorts we will always have with us) and they will say the same stupid and unoriginal things that their predecessors said before them, believing themselves to be both original and brilliant. There is nothing we can do, but regularly flush out the old shorts from the ignore button and replace them with the current crop. Meanwhile, Whole Foods will keep doing its thing–producing unmatched same store sales growth and continue its irresistable growth, driving the stock price up and the shorts off of the Board.
(link)
This, I believe is not what happens when you drink your own Kool-Aid. It’s what happens when you bathe in it, drink it and then bake a cake with it.
I’ll be posting more on the matter as it “evolves and grows”.
Edit: Eddy Elfenbein also has some nice Mackey quotes.
Jun 1st, 2007 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems | No Comments
While it’s been up for a while now, I thought I should point you to this piece on user-generated content and open source software by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Apart from the piece itself, it is notable how skilled Schwartz is in describing his vision of the future - and of course what role Sun will play in that future. The post currently has 70 comments and quite a few echo this one:
I wish there were more CEOs that understood their industry and business as well as you do, and could express it so well
Being CEO may equate to winning a popularity contest (or one in rhetorics), but I think it is out of question that someone like Schwartz gains immensely from their blogging. When you think about it, executives, senior government officials, celebrities and so forth live in a communicative bubble from which they can only get into contact with us through mediators (the traditional media). Many misconceptions about the greed and arrogance of the powerful come from what is interpreted as their aloofness - the lack of direct interaction they have with us.
Of course one needs communicative competence to begin with, otherwise a blog will hardly do any good. But I think a CEO who lacks people skills won’t last too long anyway - after all, that job is largely about people and those people will expect you to both have a plan and be able to verbalize it clearly and concisely.
Mar 18th, 2007 | Blogging Legal Issues, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, IBM, Jonathan Schwartz, PR | 2 Comments
That’s essentially the brave question that Phil Hall asks over at Strumpette (found via Blog Campaigning) in a very interesting post. He summarizes his own attitude as follows.
I would like to make a statement that many PR people will view as apostasy: I think corporate blogs are, on the whole, a waste of time.
Well, he isn’t the first to make such an outrageous claim, though it could be that he’s the first person in PR. He continues by arguing that even those company blogs that perpetrate it aren’t really written for consumers but target the media crowd.
People like me are looking for quality goods at reasonable prices. Reading the blog posting of some CEO ruminating on this-and-that is of no value to folks like me.
[Just a quick stylistic observation: it’s genuinely cute (and clever) to start a sentence with the phrase people like me and then end the next one with folks like me if you’re the former president of Open City Communications, a New York PR agency, and former editor of PR News. I imagine that PR executives with book deals are not entirely en par with the majority of people shopping at Wal-Mart in terms of income. But perhaps that’s just my dirty mind. It doesn’t hurt his argument either - I just assume that somewhere in PR school you learn that it’s always better to phrase personal opinions in the “folks-like-me-plural”.]
Hall then raises several familiar points: consumers don’t care about company blogs, blogging is risky because of litigation, a comment-enabled blog gives trolls and haters a platform, etc. He closes asking for examples of interesting corporate blogs.
But beyond those examples – sorry, but I am not aware of corporate blogs being used as anything more than a poorly-disguised sales vehicle. If you know of some genuinely clever examples of the format, please share them here – I would love to learn about them and have a reason to change my negative opinion.
I think there are quite a few counter-examples, though his criticism that many company blogs are boring and manipulative is certainly legitimate. My impression is that many smart implementations of blogging exist to improve company-internal communication. I’ve commented on the MSDN and Oracle blog hubs before - they represent knowledge management resources which enable tech experts to exchange ideas and improve products. I’m pretty sure Joe User doesn’t care about ASP.NET errors, but to people writing code for a living it’s clearly a relevant issue. Internal blogs have become a fixture in the tech sector and it seems they have potential in other areas as well. For a rare and valuable piece of empirical research on internal corporate blogging at IBM see Kolari et al (thanks to Pranam for pointing me to it).
Let’s look at other applications of corporate blogging as well. Apart from marketing there’s PR, customer relations management, recruiting, communication, lobbying and strategy blogging, plus countless hybrids. All of these functions target different groups of people (look here for a -certainly incomplete- list and more thoughts on the issue). Thus it is quite possible, nay, likely that Joe Consumer is not the target audience for XYZ Corp’s CEO blog. The target audience are partners, investors, competitors and of course journalists, who can be counted on to follow such a blog quite closely.
In that context it is interesting that Hall brings up the SEC.
And what about the investment community? Yeah, can you imagine the SEC giving the thumbs up for publicly-traded companies using blogs to communicate with investors?
Yes, I can. While no decision has been made yet (to my knowledge), I think Cox’s comment serves as an indicator that blogs may soon be used for exactly that purpose.
With such an audience, the idea that posts are edited and reviewed carefully before publication is perfectly plausible - and then again, why not? The idea that blogs must be unedited and highly personal confuses the historical origin of blogs as web-based diaries with their status today. In other words: you can use blogs purely as a means of publishing content on-line, or you can adopt a “bloggy” style of writing. There are no rules when it comes to how you write - you can rehash ad copy or explain your corporate strategy, write about annoying business trips or how to make cranberry walnut bread. All that is corporate blogging and all of it, presumably, somehow serves a purpose for the companies that sponsor it.
So corporate blogs can potentially serve a number of purposes, many of which are outside the scope of marketing or PR. Huge global players such as IBM need sophisticated tools to communicate and coordinate their efforts internally - most people will agree that email is no longer the appropriate tool for that. Beyond internal communication corporate blogs are relevant where they address specific people with some kind of stake in the company’s actions: disgruntled consumers, activists, potential employees, competitors, shareholders, journalists, bloggers. The only thing that won’t work is starting a blog about toilet paper because that’s what you happen to sell. If you can’t make it relevant to anyone, don’t start a corporate blog. The chic of blogging alone won’t do.
But in the end this is less about how companies (or institutions in general) can use blogging as an effective tool and more about how employee blogging will change companies in the long run. Corporate hierarchies partly exist to manage the flow of information inside an organization. Executives are supposed to know and understand internal processes and manage them effectively. But once everyone in an organization is more or less connected with everyone else the overall need for a strict hierarchy is at least somewhat diminished.
Now, I’m no utopian suggesting that organizations will somehow be crowd-governed in the future, but it seems plausible to assume that the monopoly of a few (management, PR, communications dept) to exclusively represent a company to “the outside world” and to control the flow of information internally is fading. Of course nobody is going to care about anything you have to say just because they buy your products. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people listening quite closely - for other reasons. My impression is that “the long tail of corporate blogging” - i.e. employee blogging - will matter more than glitzy PR texts or marketing copy in the long run. I believe this because our conception of public vs. personal communication is in the process of changing radically and in that light it seems illogical to assume that institutions will somehow be spared from the effects.
Perhaps the whole question of who drives the changes vs. who is driven by them follows the inverted logic of the classic Slashdot meme: in Soviet Russia, corporate blog writes you.
Feb 21st, 2007 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, PR | No Comments
Just finished this piece by Shel Israel on the significance of personal involvement in business blogging. As he puts it:
[…] by adding some personal information, it helps me as one of those customers, prospects, co-workers, etc. see a real human inside that labyrinth of organization where you work. […] I may want to know enough of your personal life to understand that you are a human. […] As we wrote in naked Conversations, “We live in an age when most people don’t trust large organizations.” But blogging lets us break down the large organizations into real human units of energy and it makes a great deal of difference in how the overall company is perceived.
I’ve been beating the same drum with the things I’ve posted about trust and the individual in conjunction with blogging. Blogging is in many ways symptomatic for a general trend towards individualization, a trend that acknowledges the social component of any kind of human interaction. In that vein the Edelman Trust Barometer released last month found that the trend to rely more readily on peers than on corporate or political leaders continues. “Someone like me” is the person we place the most trust in - a view that makes perfect sense when you think about how leaders in large organizations usually communicate. The distance between them and us makes us assume that they don’t know anything about us and that they have a hidden agenda when talking to us.
Here’s an interesting observation David Brain of Edelman made in an interview with the FT (see here and here):
This year “a person like me” is the most trusted source of information across the EU, North America and Latin America. In the the US trust levels are at 51 per cent and in the UK, Germany and France they average 45 per cent. We believe that the web and the rise of social networks has been a big driver of this. It has had a democratising effect if you like in that the “answers” can now be found to many questions from sources other than the old institutions. I think we are seeing an erosion of deference in all fields.
I’m sure you’ve read more than enough about Web 2.0 with all of its associated hype (I know I have), but even if Brain is quick to draw a connection between trust in peers and the social web the overall trend cannot be overlooked. As technology allows us to connect with virtually everyone we know virtually all the time, and in addition to that to connect to others with whom we share interests, beliefs and passions, we are increasingly fed up with the inflexible, rigid structure of a traditional organization. And we’re especially weary of those at the top of the pyramid because we question the power they posses because they are up there. In our new, “me-centric” organization - the social network - everything else is aligned around us, while a traditional organization ultimately revolves around itself.
One problem is clearly the perceived distance between those in power and us and it is likely the prime reason there are blogging CEOs (if too few). But I wonder if the role of leadership in general is not about to change significantly. Quote Richard Edelman:
The era of the rock star CEO is over - now it is about quiet competence and strong leadership with employees, customers and investors.
I guess that would make Steve Jobs the last of his kind…
Oct 7th, 2006 | Blogging Legal Issues, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems | No Comments
Law professor Allison Garrett (scroll down for her bio) has a post on her blog discussing the letter recently sent by Sun’s Jonathan Schwarz to SEC chairman Christopher Cox (see my earlier entry, Jonathan’s letter). Being a law expert, her perspective is different (read: more sober and realistic) than that of most bloggers, including myself:
I can see a few problems with allowing blogs to be considered compliant with Reg FD, but there may be ways around the problems. Here are some of the issues the come to mind:
1. How will investors know whether a blog is legitimately the CEO’s blog?
2. How can the CEO’s blog (which would perhaps be deemed Reg FD compliant) be distinguished from the software engineer’s personal blog that also addresses company issues?
3. Are RSS feeds reliable enough for journalists and serious investors?
4. What is the security of the blog? Could others access the CEO’s blog in some way and post messages there?
5. What if “false and misleading information” is posted in a blog? Who, besides the CEO, would have liability for the information? The audit committee might review 10-Qs prior to filing; it would have neither the time nor the inclination to review blog postings.
6. If the information is truly material, it seems that one way for the company to flag this is to make a filing on a Form 8-K. Otherwise, investors just have to guess about whether the information is material.
7. If CEOs take to blogging, they may have to give up one of the most attractive features of blogging — the ability to sort of think outloud in a candid manner. After all, an unguarded comment of the type that we bloggers make from time to time, could be career limiting.
All of these problems are either of a technical nature or related to how trustworthy blogging is as a new form of publishing. Of course, if you ask bloggers none of this is an issue, but from the perspective of the non-blogging part of the population - which still makes up the majority - things look different. Still, I can come up with a few arguments, even if it’s just from a layman’s point of view:
1. The security and verifiability of a blog is no different from that of a corporate web site in general.
2. The authorship of a blog can be verified by embedding it accordingly in the overall web site structure - if it’s located under “Company” - “Blogs” - “CEO’s blog” it is hardly plausible to assume it belongs to someone other than the CEO.
3. “False and misleading information” in a blog entry is no different from “false and misleading information” published in an interview or newspaper article (this doesn’t rule out the possibility that they might by treated differently in a legal context though).
4. Propagating information through RSS is arguably more effective than any other form of distribution. No, I don’t think that one sticks.
5. “Unguarded comments”, when made by politicians or corporate leaders, have the potential to be “career-limiting” whether they’re made at fund raisers, in interviews or posted in a blog.
Anyone with legal expertise (or without) want to pitch in?
Oct 3rd, 2006 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems | 1 Comment
If there’s an area where you can be sure for procedures to lag behind the pace of innovation, it is governmental regulations. Jonathan Schwartz has written an interesting piece on the requirements for public disclosure put forth by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Schwartz laments the fact that blogs and corporate websites don’t count as vehicles through which the public can be adequatley informed about things such as mergers or Sun’s quarterly performance. While the internet is not deemed suitable for disseminating that kind of information, the Wall Street Journal is. The fact that the WSJ is available only to subscribers (paper or bits) has not caused the rules to change… yet. It would surprise me (and Jonathan Schwartz, apparently) if the SEC didnt’t update its regulations fairly soon. There’s no need to play chinese whispers when you can talk to people directly.
Sep 27th, 2006 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, Ghostblogging | 8 Comments
Here’s a comment I just wrote as a response to Debbie Weil, who recently (among other things) discussed ghostblogging, i.e. the approach of having someone else write your CEO blog.
(Edit: this post, to which Weil refers, and the discussion that follows is really what this is all about.)
I believe that the debate about whether or not ghostblogging is acceptable is closely related to the importance of blog authorship in general. Let’s start by revisiting a few basic questions.
What are blogs not good for?
From the way they are used by most people, it seems blogs are not good for providing purely informative content that is largely independent of a specific context and derives its authority from an institution (in contrast to an individual). Examples for such writings would be legal texts, official documents, instruction manuals and - to a certain extent - press releases. Who the author is and in what context a piece was written (in terms of time, place and social situation) should not be reflected closely by the text, otherwise it cannot serve the purpose its users assign it (resolving a dispute, confirming your identity, figuring out how your toaster works, etc). A blog is also not independent of its individual author, which is precisely what these texts intend to be. Instruction manuals usually don’t credit the writer because they are meant to be used, not read to gain a better understand of who the author is.
Simplifying a whole lot, blogs are the direct opposite of these text types. Not only are they usually not meant to be “used” in any way, but they also tend to be more argumentative than informative and more subjective than universally objective. Just compare an entry on Wikipedia with any random blog post and check how often the personal pronoun “I” shows up - it’s usually 0 vs. a lot. The author of an encyclopedia entry will seek to stay as far “behind the scenes” as possible, because the article should not be about him, but about the topic described.
So what are blogs good for, then? From what I’ve seen, they primarily serve a social function. They allow me to meet Debbie Weil, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwartz in their own virtual living-room, furnished to their own individual taste, while I’m sitting right here in my office at the University of Duesseldorf. The fact that I can not only read what they have to say but actually respond and have a conversation with them is something that was unimaginable before the advent of blogging. There’s just one little catch: I have to know who I’m talking to. Because if I don’t, this miracle of communication unconstrained by time and space disappears in a big puff of smoke, as there is simply no level of trust, depth or relationship that can grow between me and an anonymous voice. Which is fine if the text in question is purely informative or instructional, but not if it’s supposed to tell me who the writer is, in his own language.
Now, you could argue that this is not the case with a ghostwritten blog - it has an author after all, just that he’s not the person under whose name things are published. True, but the problem remains that if people become aware of the disparity, they will probably find it unacceptable. Keep in mind that on the net authorship can never be validated in the same way that it is possible in person, and therefore any form of deception is likely to irreparably damage trust once it is discovered. And if that happens, you’re going to wish you’d never started a blog at all.
“But it works for ghostwritten speeches!”, you might contend. Yes, but do those really serve a social function? Do they necessarily reflect beliefs, goals and ideas which belong to the individual delivering the speech? Are they directed at individual people or crowds?
Blogs aren’t (good) megaphones, they’re fireside chats. And who you’re chatting with is at least as important as what they have to say.
Aug 12th, 2006 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, John Mackey, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems, Whole Foods Inc | No Comments
Why shouldn’t an officer of a public company start a blog? Hey, life is short.
These were the words used by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in his first blog entry made a little over two years ago. The question that Schwartz raised seemed a little more daring two years ago than it does in 2006 - at first glance. After all, podcasting and vlogs have since then been added to the bag of online publication technologies and one could conclude that blogs are basically mainstream now.
Not in the corporate world.
Yes, there is a considerable level of new- and old-media hype about this new thing called corporate blogging. And yes, a new CRM-, product- or image-blog is launched almost daily by some major corporate player. But while PR departments from San Francisco to Sindelfingen seem to be at least curious and at best ecstatic, the men (and a few women) at the helms of the world’s largest and most profitable companies are rather quiet, a fact recently lamented by the New York Times. Some talk to their employees through an internal blog, but most prefer to pass the pen (or in this case the keyboard) to their ‘communication professionals’.
The question of course is why communication should not be at the top of the agenda for CEOs. When giving his reasons for starting his blog, Schwartz noted that he wanted to get unfiltered feedback from the community. Unfiltered, huh? If we suppose that the motive of Sun’s top dog is genuine (and his impressive track record as a blogger - at least in terms of how much he’s posted over the last two years - makes that seem plausible) it suggests that there’s a whole lot of filtering going on in old-world corporate communication. Of course blogging is not some magical wand you wave that makes such a communicative insulation magically dissapear. And it seems unlikely that many executives would even want that - after all, who really wants to listen the rants of disgruntled consumers and the diatribes of anonymous blog lurkers? But if Schwartz came to the realization that talking to people directly (whether that directness is real or just feels like it is) can actually be good for business, others will eventually follow, even if they are two years late and lack Schwartz’s dedication - a dedication that may well have to do with Sun’s problems as a company and Schwartz’s need to explain the massive restructuring he is undertaking to shareholders, employees and customers.
I’ll be looking at other blogging CEOs in the near future, and at why not just any executives should consider following the example of people like Schwartz and John Mackey.
